From the Magazine

These Thousand-Dollar Toys Are Not Just for Kids

Inside Pixi & Cie, a whimsical Parisian toy store where child’s play is elevated to high art. The chief toymaker, Alexis Poliakoff, sells handmade sculpted figurines of comic-book heroes and French cartoon icons to people with plenty of disposable income.

From the outside, No. 6 seems like just another one of the boutiques and
galleries that line the narrow Rue de l’Echaudé, in the heart of Paris’s
Left Bank. Inside, it is Ali Baba’s cave. The treasures on display are
not gold and jewels but tiny metal figurines—thousands of them, set
against the backdrop of colorful décors. There are turn-of-the-century
shopkeepers, Tour de France cyclists, opera singers, film actors, haute
couture models, and, especially, popular comic-book heroes. But don’t
mistake Pixi & Cie for a toy store: it is a purveyor of dreams, whose
fiercely loyal collectors pay hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for
these limited-edition hand-painted statuettes.

Alexis Poliakoff, the creator of this magical universe, is an avuncular
74-year-old sculptor with thinning white hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and
a perpetual smile on his round face. Seated at a small table on the
boutique’s second floor, he explains that the Pixi story has long roots.
His father, the modernist painter Serge Poliakoff, fled his native
Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and wound up in Paris in 1923.
Serge, whose son describes him as having “sang Tzigane” (Gypsy blood)
and a romantic bent, made a living playing guitar in the expat Russian
cabarets before he took up painting. It was in one of those smoky dens,
in 1935, that a visiting young Englishwoman named Marcelle Perreur-Lloyd
spotted the handsome profile and dreamy eyes of this émigré musician and
fell madly in love. They were married the following year. By the time
Alexis was born, in 1942, Serge Poliakoff was already an established
artist, part of the Parisian circle that included Marc Chagall, Wassily
Kandinsky, and Nicolas de Staël.

As a young child, Alexis started hanging around his father’s studio. To
keep his son quiet while he worked, Serge gave him some modeling clay
and told him to create something of his own. The boy went at it with a
passion, making figurines inspired by his own toy-soldier collection and
heroes of the comics and adventure books that he kept in a suitcase
under his bed. “I made matadors, and bulls, and Indian camps,” he says
with a wistful smile. “I even made a Joan of Arc that I burned on a
pile of matches. My mother was afraid I had a sadistic streak.”

One of his father’s artist friends advised Alexis to abandon modeling
clay in favor of the kind of clay used by sculptors that hardens into a
permanent form. It was a revelation. Armed with more professional
techniques, he proved his talent at the age of nine by winning a contest
sponsored by the daily Le Figaro with a scale model of Paris’s Place de
la Concorde.

TINY TREASURES

Alexis Poliakoff, in the mini-museum upstairs at Pixi & Cie, in Paris.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Pixis on an Eiffel Tower.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

A diorama of Pixiboxes in the museum.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Hergé figurines.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Poliakoff on the store’s ground floor.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The Pixi & Cie storefront.

Photo: Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Poliakoff with son Thaddée at the gallery next door to the store.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

TINY TREASURES

Alexis Poliakoff, in the mini-museum upstairs at Pixi & Cie, in Paris.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Pixis on an Eiffel Tower.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

A diorama of Pixiboxes in the museum.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Pigments used to paint the figurines.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Hergé figurines.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

Poliakoff on the store’s ground floor.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The Pixi & Cie storefront.

Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

All this was far more than a childhood hobby. The boy was bubbling over
with creativity. He wanted to be an artist, but not a painter working in
the shadow of the great Serge Poliakoff. “I never wanted to be a
painter,” he says. “I couldn’t compete with my father. For me,
painters were painters, and sculptors were sculptors, with hammers and
chisels. I didn’t understand then that you could make a painting in
three dimensions.” In fact, he did briefly try his hand at
painting—one of his early abstracts was acquired by actor Yul
Brynner—but when he finally chose a career path, it was neither
painting nor sculpture that beckoned.

Armed with an 8-mm. camera—a 16th-birthday gift from his
father—Alexis started experimenting with animation, using his own
figurines and décors. His interest in the Seventh Art blossomed into a
passion in the 1960s with the coming of the French New Wave. Starting as
an apprentice, he eventually assisted such innovative filmmakers as
Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Berri, and Bertrand Tavernier. In 1969 he was
about to embark on a two-year film project in Czechoslovakia when his
father died. That event put a sudden end to Alexis’s film career. Serge
Poliakoff had left behind a prodigious body of work—some 4,000
paintings in all. Alexis, ever the dutiful son, undertook to inventory
it all and produce an annotated catalogue. It was a task that would
occupy him on and off for the next four decades. “I had a debt to my
father, but it was not a burden,” he says. “I had such a passion for
his work. My position was that I didn’t need to make a name for
myself.”

“Pixi is expensive and useless, so it has to be cool,” says Guénard.

But Alexis never lost his love for the figurines that had incarnated his
childhood fantasies. In the early 1980s, he went to England to study
mold-making techniques used by British jewelers. In his spare time, he
produced several painted décors populated by metal figurines: an
artist’s studio, a traditional butcher shop, a Parisian grocery. At
first Alexis created these nostalgic early-20th-century scenes just for
the fun of it. But his stepson, Philippe-Antoine Guénard, had another
idea.

Philippe-Antoine came into the family in 1964 at age two, when his
mother, Marie Helen Guénard, married Alexis. The boy was raised
alternately by his maternal grandfather, Pierre Guénard, owner of a
large pastry company, and Alexis and Marie Helen. One pole of his
existence was dominated by commerce; the other by art. He likes to say
that the geographical midpoint between his grandfather’s Right Bank
apartment and Alexis’s Left Bank digs was “the ticket booth of the
Louvre.” When he was 21, he seemed to be headed for a career in his
grandfather’s pastry company—until a lightbulb suddenly went on in his
head. “I was studying in business school at the time and I was bored to
death,” he tells me. “I saw the figurines Alexis was making, and I
told him, ‘You know, we could start a business with that.’ Alexis was
surprised. ‘A business?’ And that’s just what we did.”

Poliakoff with father Serge in Paris, 1956.

By John Lefebre/Archives of Serge Poliakoff.

With initial funding from Pierre Guénard, Alexis’s father-in-law, they
launched Pixi & Cie in 1982. The name combined letters from Pierre’s
and Alexis’s first names, but also evoked the charm and mystery of the
pixies of folkloric legend. In a locale belonging to Pierre’s pastry
factory in the village of Lison, near the Normandy-landing beaches,
Alexis and his stepson set up shop with a handful of locally hired
assistants. Alexis sculpted the figurines, while Philippe-Antoine
concentrated on the marketing. The first commercial venues were
international toy fairs and specialty stores. Despite the enthusiasm of
certain collectors, though, sales were sluggish. “Pixi is expensive,
small, and useless, so it has to be incredibly cool,” says
Philippe-Antoine. “It took five years before it caught on.”

In 1984, Poliakoff and Guénard opened their first Pixi boutique, at 95
Rue de Seine, in one of Paris’s best-known gallery districts. Alexis’s
daughter, Marie Victoire, then 20 years old, was drafted to run it,
though she had no commercial experience. “They plopped me down here
like a pawn: ‘You do that!’” she says, her large blue eyes sparkling
with remembered resentment. “It wasn’t easy. I was timid. I was afraid
to say hello to people.” After two years, she put her foot down and
converted the venue into a modern-art gallery. “You have to seize your
own destiny. I didn’t want to be a toy merchant all my life.” Her move
caused some friction with her half-brother, Philippe-Antoine, until new
space was found for a Pixi boutique at its current location.

“I had a debt to my father,” says Alexis Poliakoff. “But it was not a
burden.”

Marie Victoire, meanwhile, continues to run her own gallery, which
features the works of younger painters and sculptors. Fiercely devoted
to family, she has written a sensitive and beautifully illustrated 2011
biography of her grandfather, Serge Poliakoff, Mon Grand-Père. Receiving
me in the back room of her gallery, a cozy salon with an old-Russia
feel—burning candles, leopardskin couch, walls covered with paintings
and family photographs—Marie Victoire calls her father “the most
delicious person I have ever met. He is a child at heart. He has the
freshness of a child—he always has an expression of wonder.” She
shows me some of Alexis’s paintings—nostalgic monochrome re-creations
of long-ago dinner parties—and muses on his improbable career. “My
father is an enormously talented artist, except that he was never pushed
and supported by his father,” she says. “He did his duty, but he could
never realize himself. That’s why Pixi was such a fantastic thing for
him. He is a true sculptor. His figurines are small, but if you make
them two meters high, it’s better than Jeff Koons.”

Comic Reliefs

The Pixi adventure really took off in 1988, when Alexis acquired the
rights to produce characters from Hergé’s beloved Tintin comic books
about a brave young reporter. “When we started to propose objects based
on Tintin, there were none on the market,” he explains. “There was a
whole public that was just waiting for that.” Other comic-book
characters soon followed, based mostly on popular French and Belgian
series—Lucky Luke, Asterix, Babar, the Smurfs—but also including the
panoply of Disney and “Peanuts” characters. In a country where the
comic book, or bande dessinée, is considered a high enough art form to
merit its own annual festival and is celebrated by the French Culture
Ministry, Pixi’s foray into this popular domain touched off a feeding
frenzy among collectors. “Once it caught on, we were shipping trailer
trucks full of Pixis,” says Guénard.

Adult collectors make up Pixi’s main clientele. The painted
figurines—made of lead-free white metal—are still not intended for
children. Nor are the prices in the Toys “R” Us range: figurines from
the numbered, limited-edition collections cost between $60 and $900
new, and rare pieces can fetch thousands at auction. In 1991, with an
eye on the youth market, Guénard launched a lower-priced, mass-produced
plastic line, called Plastoy, which now generates far more revenue than
the original metal statuettes. Pixi’s annual sales average about $1
million; at its peak, Plastoy was averaging $9 million. “It’s like
haute couture versus pret-à-porter,” Guénard explains. “Pixi makes at
most 1,000 units of each figurine. Plastoy produces 10,000.”

On a tour of the Pixi factory in Normandy, Guénard, 55, walks me through
a labyrinth of workshops, where seven employees dressed in red uniforms
perform a series of artisanal tasks—sculpting, casting, painting.
Though the original Pixis were all the work of Alexis, he has trained
other sculptors to create new figurines in his style. Most are the size
of traditional lead soldiers—54 mm. up to the eye level. Many are
accompanied by tiny accessories—pistols, swords, hats, whiskey
bottles, even a barroom spittoon. When each figure is finished, it is
checked for quality, cloaked in bubble wrap, and placed in a bright-red
box emblazoned with the Pixi logo—a playful dog named Roger-Roger,
with its right ear cocked high. Each box contains a certificate of
authenticity, an essential guarantee for collectors.

“Bank presidents, businessmen . . . they all talk about Pixi like
kids in the schoolyard.”

Guénard describes Pixi’s collectors as mostly male and middle-aged.
“There are all kinds,” he says. “Men with lots of money, bank
presidents, businessmen, along with simpler folk. But when they come to
the boutique for our special receptions, they all talk about Pixi like
kids in the schoolyard.” Pixi’s serious collectors, he says, number
some 1,000, including about 200 who collect “everything.” One of those
put his whole collection up for sale at the Drouot auction house in
2014. It fetched $340,000.

As collectors go, Alexis Poliakoff is no slouch. His apartment in an
18th-century building near the Place de l’Odéon is jam-packed with
sculptures, books, paintings, and bric-a-brac. A floor-to-ceiling
bookcase contains his precious collection of Jules Verne first editions.
There are African masks, Hopi Indian dolls, neon sculptures, whole
regiments of toy soldiers, his father’s seven-string Russian guitar. The
walls are covered with stunning Poliakoff canvases. And, naturally,
there are hundreds of Pixis, which Alexis continues to sculpt in the
sixth-floor maid’s room, which he converted into a workshop.

Poliakoff on the store’s ground floor; inset, the storefront.

Photographs by Jonathan Becker.

Go Figurine

In 2012, Pixi achieved its ultimate consecration in the form of a
retrospective exhibition at Paris’s prestigious Musée Maillol. The
four-month show drew 100,000 visitors and featured some 10,000
figurines. Its centerpiece was the embodiment of Alexis Poliakoff’s most
exuberant fantasy: a re-creation of designer and filmmaker Jean-Paul
Goude’s famous 1989 Champs-Élysées parade celebrating the bicentennial
of the French Revolution. Complete with plumed African drummers, Chinese
cyclists, Russian ballerinas, French waltzers, Pakistani dancers, and
American marching bands, the display spread out over 50 feet, comprised
3,000 figurines, and took Alexis two years to complete.

The Maillol show gave Pixi a new status by presenting it not as a toy
collection but as a true art form. Now the company has offers for major
shows by museums in Holland, Belgium, and Italy. “We need that,” says
Guénard. “That’s how we recruit new collectors.” As for Alexis, who
has always kept aloof from business matters and remained in his own
creative bubble, his future projects are more personal: a set of
figurines, just for himself, based on Marcel Proust’s novels; a memoir
of his own life; and a book on his father’s childhood illustrated by his
granddaughter, Sacha. And he continues to sculpt new Pixis. “You have
to have fun,” he says. “I make things that are not serious, but I do
it very seriously.”

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